TITLE: Patio
NAME: Michael Scholz
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de
TOPIC: Gardens
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: patio.jpg
ZIPFILE: patio.zip
RENDERER USED:
3DStudioMax2.5
TOOLS USED:
Photoshop5.5 for copyright text and jpg-file
RENDER TIME:
46 minutes
HARDWARE USED:
Dual PII400, 256MB Ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This is a welcoming and peaceful garden, where I would like to be.
A video clip by the german techno-trance band Schiller inspired me
to parts of this image: it showed a minimalistic garden surrounded
by structural glazing. There was water crossing through, and there
were one or two bonsai-like trees. I started with this in the back
of my head. More ideas came during the project and brought several
changes: sand, rocks, more plants and stones, chairs and umbrella.
The zip-file contains a series of pics which show the "making-of".
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Texturing
The out-of-focus plants along the image borders are simple texture
mapped planes, which have blurred opacity maps to get this effect.
Treeleaves are also textured planes. The water mirrors more in the
distance because of a gradient masking the reflection in the near.
Lighting
A direct light (sun) from above and several attenuated omnis with-
in the scene to simulate radiosity: two light yellow ones for sand
radiosity, two light green ones behind the glazing plus one orange
omni where the umbrella is. And some more for lighting up shadows.
To light up shadows I use "devided" lights: take the shadowcasting
lightsource (A) and clone it (B). Turn clone (B) shadowcasting off
and reduce its intensity to 30%, reduce the shadowcaster light (A)
to 70% intensity = overall lighting is 100% but shadow is lighter.